Photo of the day: Throwback Thursday! Revisiting PEI

I‘ve been sorting and culling old photos this week. I need to organize them for a couple of annual projects (a calendar for my parents for Christmas, and an annual family photo book) and my hard drive is also more than 80%, almost 90% full. So I’ve had my nose in folder upon folder of the photos I’ve taken since 2014, and none of them makes me more happy and more achy with nostalgia than the ones I took in PEI.

PEI revisited

That’s the view from the Panmure Island lighthouse. Siiiiiiiigh.

Did I tell you we’ve already booked for summer 2015? We decided to book for two weeks on the north part of the island, not far from Greenwich national park. And in a stunningly responsible turn of events, we’ve already saved up more than 2/3 the cost of the cottage rental. Yay us! Amazing what you can do with the proper motivation.

I haven’t entirely given up on the idea of moving to PEI one day. We talk about it all the time, but I don’t see it as being practical any time before all the kids are grown up and (whimper) moved out. I can, however, see us spending incrementally more of each summer there. The idea of the gorgeous red sand, the emerald fields and the blue ocean will do a lot to carry me through the upcoming winter, that’s for sure.

Have you ever fallen cataclysmically in love with a place? Where? What did you do about it?

Watch out for that wrong turn in Maine when you’re outrunning a hurricane!

It’s been a week since we left PEI. I think maybe I’m drawing out the blogging of our vacation so I can continue to relive it in real time. We haven’t really left until the blog posts are done, right?

You might remember that through a fluke of good timing our departure was conveniently scheduled for the very day Hurricane Arthur was skimming its way up the Atlantic coast toward the Maritimes. As we regretfully packed up the car and headed back across the Island to the Confederation Bridge and then across the southern boundary of New Brunswick, we kept a wary eye on the (generally benign) summer skies. Interestingly, the temperature plummeted 10C and fog rolled in as we passed through St John, and then just as abruptly burned off again as we continued on toward the border at Saint Stephen.

We’d chosen that route, as opposed to Google Map’s suggestion to cross at Houlton, Maine and zip down the I-95, because I hate to backtrack, and the idea of driving all the way back to Woodstock NB, where we had stayed our first night, and then continuing for two more hours on to Skowhegan Maine down the interstate seemed unnecessary repetition. What I didn’t account for is how desolate the highway is through Maine from Calais to Bangor – yikes! Very little cellular reception, lots of abandoned and derelict properties, and not a soul on the roads. With a hurricane pending. You can imagine our discomfort. Also, while the drive on the New Brunswick side of the border seemed a lot less, um, downtrodden, it was pretty much the same as every NB highway I’ve seen – trees, trees and more trees. No offense to my friends who live in or hail from New Brunswick, but something about the province just makes me itch to be able to get through it more quickly. Maybe that’s why the speed limit is 110 km/h?

Regardless, we made it to Bangor just as the rain started, and made it on to Skowhegan without much more ado. Of course, having arrived on Independence Day made it a bit more challenging to find an open place for dinner, but when we did stumble across the Whit’s End Bar & Grill (thank you Trip Advisor!) we found an excellent family restaurant with fantastic fried haddock. Yum!

With not much else to do, the rain becoming more insistent and a few hours to kill until bedtime, we entertained ourselves in the tiny convenience store appended to a gas station where we marveled over the selection of American candy. No, we don’t get out much. Beloved found candy for grown-ups too: a whole selection of Duck Commander wine! You find all the classiest treats in the gas bar!

Another thing I learned on this trip is that you get better service and a greater willingness to accommodate families of five travelers in smaller motels than in the big chains. The Belmont Motel was cheap, clean and more than willing to offer up a cot for an extra child into a room with two queen beds, and cheaper by half than the Best Western that would officially only accommodate four of us. Plus the owner and his cat were both charmers.

By Saturday morning, we all just wanted to be back home. The soggy remnants of Hurricane Arthur ensured a constant driving rain, although no significant winds in our neck of the woods at least, and the wet grey morning perfectly matched my mood as Tim Horton’s failed to deliver a restaurant in Skowhegan that was clearly indicated on the Timmy Me app. Luckily for everyone but me, there was a WalMart with a Dunkin Donuts directly across from the motel, so our most basic coffee needs were met and Beloved managed to collect some of his favourite American sugar bomb cereals to bring home.

The last lesson we learned on the way home is to be careful when travelling through rural Maine and following a printout of Google Maps because of the spotty cellular coverage that you don’t veer left when you were supposed to forge ahead. Although we had passed a few signs assuring us the Canadian border was less than 50 miles ahead, when we’d driven for more than an hour up and then down and then up again on twisty mountain roads and we suddenly found ourselves in Hillbilly Hills, New Hampshire instead of Canada but still with no cellular signal – well, you can imagine our dismay. This is the route we should have followed.

This is the route we actually followed, which added not the optimistic 30 minutes that Google Maps supposes, but I’m guessing at least 90 minutes to the full trip.

The good news is that our little detour was truly gorgeous – we passed Sugarloaf, the Green Mountaints and the Dixville Notch (population 12) as well as endless hunting and fishing camps, but alarmingly few gas stations and other signs of civilization. And did I mention no cellular signal? Yeah. We did see a moose, though, so that was kind of cool!

My Maine moose

Sadly, he didn’t know the way to Canada, either. Eventually, blessedly, we picked up a signal and oriented ourselves to a small border crossing at Canaan, which may have been in either New Hampshire or Vermont – by that time, I’d lost track. We pointed ourselves in that direction, figured out the most direct route, and promptly got stuck in Colebrook NH as we tried to turn on to Route 3 N, aka Main Street Colebrook, and got stuck watching their Independence Day parade, delayed by a day by Hurricane Arthur. Vexed yet AGAIN by a hurricane! So that added another good 20 – 30 minutes to the trip, but by that time all we could do was laugh. Well, Beloved and I laughed. The kids were not nearly so amused by the parade as one might have expected. Even kid nerves can be worn a little thin by excessive amounts of travel delays and mishaps, I guess.

We did eventually make it back into Canada, and were delighted by the four bars of cellular access and the wide, flat, well-populated highways of the Eastern Townships. Such amazingly gorgeous countryside that is – and all we wanted to do was zip through it as fast as the speed limit would carry us. We finally did make it home about two hours later than I’d estimated leaving the motel in Skowhagen, but we made it intact and without serious mishap.

And hey, it’s all good when it makes for good bloggy fodder, right?

Photo of the day: Lupins at the seashore

One of the unexpected beauties of our trip to Prince Edward Island were the beautiful pink, purple, yellow and cream lupins growing wild almost everywhere we went.

Lupines at Basin Head PEI

These ones were growing between the dunes at Basin Head provincial park, but they were in just about every vista we saw. I don’t remember ever seeing them around Ottawa – surely we’re in a similar temperate zone, can I grow them here? Honestly, before we went to PEI, everything I knew about lupins I learned from Monty Python!

PS WordPress really wants me to spell “lupin” as “lupine” – but they’re not really wolf-like, are they? Hmm, today’s photo seems to raise more questions than it answers…

Photo of the day: Beach jump!

I wouldn’t have thought a rocky beach would be preferable to a sandy beach. Luckily, the beach at Greenwich PEI National Park has both gorgeous sand and great big red sandstone rocks for jumping. This is one of my favourite photos of the trip.

Adventures in PEI

It says summer and sand and sea and play – all the things that comprise a wonderful day at the beach.

A happy anniversary in Souris, PEI

Fifteen years ago on July 3, 1999 Beloved and I were married. It seems fitting that 15 years of marriage is celebrated with the most fun day of our adventure on Prince Edward Island. It also seems fitting that it was our favourite day not by design but happy accident. That’s pretty much how we roll.

Souris is a scenic 60 minute drive up the far eastern side of PEI from our home base of Murray Harbour North, conveniently passing through the town of Montague “the Beautiful” also known as “Montague, home of the only Tim Horton’s for 60 km in any direction.” We set off to Souris with two objectives in mind: Chef Michael Smith’s Flavour Shack, and beachcombing for sea glass. We nearly drove by the Flavour Shack on our way into town – it sits with a few other lovely little shops on a boardwalk on the beach right as you’re coming into Souris.

We arrived just as they were opening for the day, and in addition to perusing the selections of autographed cookbooks (bought one!) and embroidered aprons (bought one!) there are some unique PEI products and ingredients, as well as some original illustrations by Chef Michael himself. Did you know he was a design student before he became a chef? That explains the lovely neat chalk writing, eh? And while we perused, we chatted with the influx of his staff, who were busy preparing for the Village Feast scheduled for the day after we were to leave PEI. Despite the fact that they were dealing with minor fiascoes like the Chef’s flight being delayed and a hurricane bearing down on their event with less than 48 hours to go, they were remarkably kind and friendly. And this photo is going up in a frame in our kitchen:

At the Flavour Shack

While we chatted with the staff, I could hear Tristan and Simon talking to one of the young ladies affiliated with the Flavour Shack. (They all seemed to be related, but I lost track of who belonged to whom!) She was telling them about Basin Head with its “singing sands” and a bridge from which you could jump into the water. I have great admiration for a young woman who can speak with such kindness and enthusiasm to a couple of pre-teen boys! Once we had had our photos taken and tucked our new purchases safely into the car, we spent another little while wandering the beach right beside the boardwalk looking for sea glass and other treasures, but the tide was fairly high and while we filled our pockets, it was admittedly nothing quite like what we’d seen in Nova Scotia in 2010.

We had a quick lunch in town (I’ve grown rather fond of seafood chowder, something I’d never tried before this trip!) and explored the Souris Lighthouse with an exhibit of sea glass and its various sources.

Souris and Basin Head PEI

Souris and Basin Head PEI

Souris and Basin Head PEI

Tristan and Simon lobbied hard for a visit to Basin Head beach after listening to Brittany’s recommendation. It had been windy and coolish in Souris, and after being pelted with sand the previous day at Cavendish beach the day before, we weren’t sure if we were up for another beach day. With nothing else in mind, we figured at the least we’d go and check out the singing sands and stick our toes in the surf. Best decision of the day!

Souris and Basin Head PEI

Despite the fact that the water was a brisk 13C, you can see we stuck a little more than our toes in the water.

Souris and Basin Head PEI

Souris and Basin Head PEI

Souris and Basin Head PEI

Souris and Basin Head PEI

Souris and Basin Head PEI

Sitting on the sand at Basin Harbour with my camera in my hand watching the boys play was the happiest I was in our whole vacation. It was truly a perfect afternoon and a wonderful way to celebrate our wedding anniversary.

The boys were thwarted in their plans to jump from the bridge into the inlet, though. Brittany and her friends may get away with it, but the “NO JUMPING FROM BRIDGE” signs were enough to convince me it was a bad idea, despite the handful of teenagers who were doing just that. This was the only jumping in which the boys indulged at Basin Head – but it was enough to keep them happy!

Souris and Basin Head PEI

On the way home, the tide was receding and we couldn’t resist stopping one more time near the boardwalk to hunt for sea glass.

Souris and Basin Head PEI

There was a bounty! This is just a portion of what I had stashed in my pocket.

And we chatted with this gentleman who was harvesting soft shell clams for a local restaurant. He’d only been at it for about 20 minutes and had filled one entire bucket.

Souris and Basin Head PEI

And this morning, a mere 72 hours after we left PEI, I found myself googling “Souris vacation rentals 2015”. I can’t think of a better endorsement for the day than that! This time, though, we’ll be sure to time our visit to catch either the Mermaid’s Tears sea glass festival or the Village Feast – if not both!

Photo of the day: Basin Head beach

So! Many! Photos! Now that we’re back home I’m hoping to work my way through a bunch of my favourite photos from PEI as the photo of the day over the next little while. This was from our last day. While we were visiting Chef Michael Smith’s Flavour Shack, some of the girls who work there recommended to the boys that we visit Basin Head provincial park. It turned out to be our favourite beach of all!

Souris and Basin Head PEI

More photos on Flickr, and lots more blogging to come. I wonder whether I’ll run out of blog posts or loads of laundry first?

Photo of the day: Stalking Chef Michael Smith at the Flavour Shack

Remember how my mom said I should call our trip to PEI “Stalking Chef Michael Smith“? Well we couldn’t very well come all the way here without making the drive up the coast to Souris, PEI, to see his brand new (9 days old!) shop the Flavour Shack, could we?

At the Flavour Shack

Is it ironic that my favourite photo of the trip is one I didn’t take? Not only are the peeps in the Flavour Shack the kindest, most friendly peeps in all of a province that seems to be swarming with kind and friendly peeps, but one just happened to be a photographer as well. And as we were posing, they were pulling out an apron for me to wear (I later bought my own!) and then suddenly Beloved was wearing the jacket of Chef Michael himself!

We loved the Flavour Shack, and I can’t wait to find five peaceful minutes to peruse my new (autographed!) Fast Flavours cookbook. I have tonnes more photos to share of Souris and Basin Head beach and our sea glass bounty too, but first I have to get organized for the long drive tomorrow. Last night in PEI, and it was a perfect day and perfect way to end the trip. Happy anniversary indeed!

The boys of Green Gables, Cavendish beach and more lighthouses

So this pretty much sums up our vacation so far:

No really, the clouds actually looked like this! ;)

Even though it was a longish drive from our rural corner of the Island, we couldn’t really come all the way to PEI without checking out Anne of Green Gables shore, could we? An hour and a half drive up the twisty, winding north coastal roads (because we hate to drive the same road twice if we can avoid it) brought us from the southeast corner of PEI to tourist central at Cavendish, and our first stop of the day was the famous Green Gables.

Cavendish, PEI

Cavendish, PEI

Cavendish, PEI

Cavendish, PEI

We decided to forgo the rather expensive Avonlea Village and opted instead to check out the kitschy shops of the Cavendish boardwalk, and explored Cavendish beach, where white sands meet red sandstone.

Cavendish, PEI

“Hey boys, see those red rocks way over there? We should go climb on them!” says no sane mother anywhere on a blazing 30C day with 60 km/h winds whipping sand. Except me.

cavendish

That’s at least a kilometer walk, maybe more, and at least half of it is picking your way from rock to wobbly rock. Unless you’re part mountain goat, which my eldest and youngest clearly are, because while I tottered and lumbered and held my camera wrapped in a bag to protect it from the sand, they leapt like gazelles with wings.

Cavendish, PEI

Cavendish, PEI

Cavendish, PEI

We made it all the way to the point!

Cavendish, PEI

And then back again.

Cavendish, PEI

And then back in the car, where we heard about the hurricane (!) bearing down on PEI. Seriously, what IS it about our family vacations and hurricanes? Oh well, we should be on our way home by the time it hits, but we may get brushed by it in Maine. Best to enjoy as much of the Island as we can while the sun shines. Hey, you know what’s a really good idea after the longest day of driving around the Island? Heading down to the most southesterly point of PEI to check out Cape Bear Lighthouse in the sunset!

Cavendish, PEI

Closed to the public by the time we arrived, but still a gorgeous drive through the most pastoral land we have seen on an Island that seems to be lousy with it. I want to live here please!

Cavendish, PEI

One day of exploring left! And I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the day Beloved and I got married. Happy anniversary, sweetheart – I do love you so! xo

Photo of the day: Canada Day in Charlottetown

If you’re going to be in PEI for Canada Day, there are few things better I can think of doing than going to see Anne of Green Gables the Musical at the Confederation Centre for the Arts for their first performance of their 50th (!) season. That’s more than 2800 performances and 16 different Annes (with an “e”!) since 1964. We loved it, loved it, loved it. If you’ll remember, I had never read (oh the shame!) Anne of Green Gables before I read it to the big boys earlier this year, and so we had a nice mix of familiarity and unfamiliarity with the story among the five of us. Even Lucas sat (mostly) still and engaged through the whole thing. It was perfect!

So between the hour drive in and then back out of Charlottetown and the three hour performance and the obligatory stop for ice cream and a bit of wandering and dinner (BoomBurger, highly recommended! Best fries on the Island!) we don’t have a lot of photos of our Canada Day celebrating the sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) of the signing of the Charlottetown Accord, which gave birth to Canada. But a gentleman outside the was kind enough to act as a human tripod and take this one for us, and I think that just about sums it up.

Canada Day 2014

Look mom, I’m IN the picture!! 😉

Postcards from PEI: Lighthouses, artisans and the ocean

When I was endlessly googling PEI cottage rentals in the cold dark heart of winter, there was a very short list of things I wanted to get out of our PEI vacation and at the top of that list was morning coffee watching the sun rise over the ocean.

Pretty much exactly like this:

This is the sunrise over the ocean I watched with my morning coffee. :)

And then Tristan and I walked down our personal, private beach for a while, admiring the islands and the rocks and the unbelievable quiet of just the water lapping the red sand shores and the birds. It’s a good day when you get your to-do list accomplished by 9 am. It was a little early to call it a day, though, so we decided to go on a bit of a drive following an agenda mostly comprising “which way?” “Um, how about that way?” “Sure!”

Our first stop conveniently checked another item off the mental to-do list: Panmure Island and its 161 year old lighthouse, the oldest wooden lighthouse in PEI.

Adventures in PEI

It was worth the $12 family rate to climb the stairs up the five floors to the top. Our guide Leona was the daughter of a man who was the lighthouse keeper for 35 years and she shared lots of interesting tidbits from how the lighthouse worked in the days before electricity (it involved a process I didn’t quite follow involving a bowl of mercury, a flame, a magnifying glass and weights that slowly lowered to keep the light turning through the night), shipwrecks, and the life of a lighthouse keeper.

We all made it to the top!

Adventures in PEI

We coffeed up in Montague (one of only two Timmies on this side of the Island!) and headed on to Georgetown. At first we were a little underwhelmed by Georgetown, although it does have a lovely little waterfront park.

Adventures in PEI

And then we discovered Shoreline Designs and had one of my favourite PEI experiences so far. It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but if you travel to this end of PEI you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t stop in for a browse in Peter Llewellyn’s workshop. He crafts the most beautiful jewellery and art from seaglass, silver and PEI’s red rocks. He started talking to Tristan and before we knew it, Tristan was getting a lesson in how to hammer copper. Then we were invited into his back workshop where he showed us how he refines PEI’s red sandstone to give it a granite-like shine. He picked up a piece off his worktable and showed us the fossils and sediment lines, then handed it to Beloved told him to keep it. He started describing how you can put it in the microwave to heat it up and use it as a hot rock for sore muscles, and when I joked that he was trying to get me to blow up my microwave he took it back and demonstrated how it not only holds but retains the heat. While we chatted amiably with Peter, Lucas petted his patient old black dog on the porch. We left with huge smiles, hammered silver rings for the big boys, a new copper and silver cuff for me, lessons in metallurgy and geology, and the feeling that we’d found one of the best treasures on the Island.

Adventures in PEI

(He has an online store – check him out for affordable and incredibly beautiful handcrafted jewellery!)

My friend Sarah had shared her favourite PEI vacations with me over coffee one day, and one recommendation she’d made was PEI National Park. The idea of dunes, boardwalks and ocean beaches was more than enough to lure us up to the north side of the Island. On the way, we stopped for lunch in the picture-perfect community of St Peter’s Bay. We noticed a place called Rick’s Fish and Chips seemed to have quite a few cars in the parking lot, a good sign of a local favourite, so we made our way in. To our delight, we found out that Rick’s had been featured in the Food Network show Ya Gotta Eat Here a few years ago – another show I watch a lot at the gym when Chef Michael Smith isn’t on. 😉 The menu helpfully points to the seafood pizza that was featured on the show (mussels, shrimp, lobster and fish, if I remember correctly) and so Simon and I decided to share one. It was the best thing I’ve eaten so far – yum!

One thing I was not anticipating for our PEI vacation was this blazing heat. I’d been watching the forecasts and expected coolish ocean breezes with sunshine and temperatures around 20C. It’s been at least 10C warmer than that, and with bellies full of clams and seafood pizza, the 5 km hike to the dunes of PEI National Park in the blazing late afternoon sun held increasingly diminishing appeal. In the end we decided that a walk on the beach would be more our speed, but we brought out bathing suits and towels just in case.

Good thing we did. Turns out the boys like the white sands of the northern Island beaches just as much as the red sands of the south shore!

Adventures in PEI

Adventures in PEI

Adventures in PEI

Given it was the beginning of the tourist season in Canada’s favourite vacation destination and a sweltering heat wave, you can imagine that the day-before-Canada-Day crowds on the beach would be intense – we had to elbow our way through the crowds to get some breathing space. 😉

Adventures in PEI

And dunes! Maybe not the sweeping dunes for which Greenwich is known, but pretty impressive dunes nonetheless, and plenty fun for climbing and then sand-surfing back down again.

Adventures in PEI

Adventures in PEI

Adventures in PEI

Sadly, just as I was taking these, a woman approached me and informed me that climbing on the dunes is not permitted as it is bad for the grasses that grow on them and contributes to erosion. A part of me wanted to tell her we had driven many many MANY hours to climb on those dunes and dammit, we were going to do it… but that felt like an ugly tourist sort of thing to do, and so I simply nodded and thanked her for the information. The boys were pretty happy to go back to doing this, anyway:

Adventures in PEI

So there were dunes, just not big ones, and not ones you could climb on. And there were boardwalks, too!

Adventures in PEI

We were overcooked, overtired, salty and sandy by this point – exactly how you want to be after spending time at the beach! We stopped for a quick dinner on the way home in Montague at Gillie’s Drive In Diner. They have old-fashioned car hop service, but it was waaaaay too hot to be sitting in the car and we were grateful for the air conditioned diner seating. And the ice cream, of course. We’ve sampled a lot of PEI ice cream so far, and we haven’t even hit the Cows factory yet!

So while it has been a picture-perfect (pardon the pun) trip so far, there have been three things we could have done without on this trip.

One is the mosquitoes and black flies and deer flies. They’re fierce and they’re hungry! We’re bathing in sunscreen and bug spray several times a day, but we’re all still a little bug-bitten.

The second is the jellyfish. Yeesh, and I thought the Luna moths were creepy. We saw one on the shore at the cottage while walking the beach, and saw quite a few in the water at PEI National Park. After a crash Google course, I now know what we saw were the relatively common Lion’s Mane jellyfish, which can grow up to 2m in length with tentacles of more than 30m. *faints* The ones we saw were considerably smaller, about the size of a softball, though one was closer to basketball sized with zillions of *shudder* tentacles closer to 30 cm in length. I also know that stings from these jellyfish are on par with a bee sting (uncomfortable but short-lived) and how to treat a sting, and I know that I will never ever visit the waters of Australia, where the box jellyfish can sting you to death. Beloved already has a big red X over Australia as a potential vacation destination due to the preponderance of deadly snakes, so I suppose that was no big loss on our part.

The final inconvenience? Talk about first world problems. The boys can’t find a version of Treehouse or Family or other kids’ channels that don’t have Described Video turned on. If you thought SpongeBob SquarePants was annoying before, you should try an hour of the DV version! 😉

So if that’s as bad as it gets, it’s pretty darn good.

Today, we’re off to celebrate Canada Day in Charlottetown, including a matinee performance of the Anne of Green Gables musical. I can’t imagine a more perfect way to celebrate the sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) of the signing of the Charlottetown accord, which led to the formation of our beautiful country in 1867.

But first, I think I need to go walk on the beach with my coffee and my camera. Again. 🙂